2 Replies - 1139 Views - Last Post: 14 June 2011 - 11:03 AM

[link] Debugger Canvas

Microsoft and Brown University have collaborated to create Debugger Canvas, a free Power Tool that adds Code Bubbles™ to Visual Studio for a new way to debug.

Do you get lost in the document tabs? Are you tired of the debugger jumping around from file to file? Debugger Canvas pulls together the code you’re exploring onto a single pan-and-zoom display. As you hit breakpoints or step into code, Debugger Canvas shows just the methods that you’re debugging, with call lines and local variables, to help you see the bigger picture.

This seems like a pretty damn nifty add on. I'll have to install it and test it out later.

Is anyone else going to find an alternative approach to debugging useful?

We’ve heard you loud and clear that you wish Debugger Canvas wasn’t Ultimate-only. We would love to make Debugger Canvas available to a wider audience, but as Soma says on his blog, Debugger Canvas is built on top of Visual Studio Ultimate so that we could re-use the underlying technology for the Dependency Diagrams to identify and display the right fragments on the canvas. This re-use is what made it possible for us to release an out-of-band power tool in an efficient manner on top of Visual Studio 2010. It's unlikely that we'll be able to make this version of the power tool available in Pro, but the best way to help us make Debugger Canvas available in other versions of Visual Studio is to let Soma know that you'd like to see this kind of user experience built directly "in the box" as part of Visual Studio.